THE HEIDEGGERIAN PROPOSITIONS FOR CHRISTIAN CONTEMPLATIVE ECOLOGY

Kasie ShahbazChristian Contemplative Practice: Capstone

May 22, 2014

Heidegger pursues true metaphysics in relation to being, a question “after”

being, instead of “beyond” it. He thinks that philosophy has forgotten being in itself.

According to him, “formulating thinking of metaphysics could never arrive at that

essence of truth,” because it is not a question of the history of pre-Socratic

philosophy, but rather “of paying attention to the arrival of the as yet unspoken of

emergence as what be [ing] has announced itself to be.”1 Heidegger’s nothingness is

the apophaticism of western philosophy. However it, like the contemplative being in

the world, Heidegger’s experience of this nothingness opens up a more authentic

encounter with being itself. Christian identity is endlessly mysterious, its core

somewhat lost in a muddle of Greco-Roman philosophy and arguments on

orthodoxy. However, if the Heideggerian question is of how to encounter

nothingness beyond logical negation of a primarily conceptual experience of being,

then the Christian equivalent ought to be how to embody Christ in the world. If

nothingness and being exist together in a sort of Father and Son relationship, then

the “ecstatic instanding” that Heidegger posits to receive this relationship is the

equivalent to living the Gospel.

In his essay What Is Metaphysics, Heidegger seeks to experience true

emptiness, similarly to Zen objective. He has found a problem with the western

philosophical tradition and its logical and historical cage, which has forgotten about

being itself. To resolve this impossible struggle, Heidegger philosophically paves the

way for experience that does not necessitate the use of reason. Within the

encounter, all logical linkage dissolves, and only nothingness remains. He asks, after

1 Heidegger, Martin. Introduction to metaphysics. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000, 7.

this experience, “How do things stand with no-thing?” 2 And, how do we then, relate

to both? It may be the same question as the Christian mystic seeking to embody

Christ whilst encountering a radical apophaticism.

Heidegger’s thought is infamous for its dense, torturous prose. However, his

thesis is quite simple. All he begs for is an encounter; it is not anything we have not

heard from countless mystics or Zen monks. However, what gives Heidegger a

certain kind of power are both his philosophical context, and his ruthless conviction

to “instand,” meaning to stand within every experience, even of utter nothingness

and dread. Because he is responding to an essentially Platonic tradition, unwittingly

attached to the assumption that the reasoning faculty of the soul is its highest part,

he yolks together western metaphysical thought, and the repudiation of it. By

responding against it within its own tradition, he finally infuses western philosophy

with nothingness, instead of offering it beside the tradition, as to not push

boundaries or ever truly integrate the two. By logically explicating the futility of

logic in the realm of being, he does not just encounter nothingness beside himself,

but asserts the necessity of this encounter with the urgency of thousands of years of

metaphysical thought that has forgotten being itself. In doing so, he powerfully

integrates the human experience. Not historically or in terms of carefully tracing the

evolution of philosophy, but by, as in one fell swoop, showing where thought ends

and being begins. He turns away from philosophy but comes back to heal with it, like

a monk with the world.

2 Heidegger, 35.

I am enjoining Heidegger’s thought with what I believe to be a Christian

hermeneutic, because the core of Christianity bolsters this full encounter with

nothingness and being in love. Without love, Heidegger’s model for the good life

may just be painful insanity. However, grounded in incarnation, Heidegger’s mode of

being seems only appropriate. It is the embodiment of faith and trust, giving one’s

self to the Other. The question remains for me: is it more an act of love to let love

inform our experiences of the world, or is it more an act of love to let that

nothingness and dread mold our perceptions? Can we do both at the same time, and

how are these aligned with living the Gospel?

The juxtaposition of Heideggerian thought and passages from the Gospel may

seem simplistic and anachronistic. However, my intention in this treatise is to note a

significant similarity in Christian mystical experience and Heideggerian thought.

Considering the parallels between their progresses of understanding, I intend to

demonstrate how they may support each other, in terms of language and history.

Gifting each other with theological and philosophical underpinnings that serve to

root their profound claims within human experience, they may also find their

glorious realization and purposeful freedom in the “open sphere” of being, or rather,

exposure to a contemplative ecology.

Heidegger begins troubled over western philosophical penetrations into

metaphysics. He writes, “formulating thinking of metaphysics could never arrive at

that essence of truth.” 3 To Heidegger, being itself is hidden, because when it is

revealed, it is revealed in images and thoughts. It is fundamental to the

3 Heidegger, 2.

understanding of Heidegger that he seeks a kind of objectivity, that which appears

on its own terms, and therefore the primary emergence of being. Metaphysical

thought “draws away from its own basis because in the realization of emergence,

what is coming to pass in it, namely, hiddenness, always fails to appear…just so as to

be able to appear as be-ing.” 4 Metaphysics continually upholds the appearance of

asking and answering the question about being, but it does not ask the question

“because it only has being in mind while it formulates being as being.” 5 Now, what is

the real question, then, that encounters being without formulating being as being? It

is rather, “How do things stand with no-thing?” 6 Being without nothingness is not

being. Being without nothingness is “being as being,” meaning being as metaphysical

thought has formulated it, which has “without knowing it thereby shown to be the

barrier that denies man the original relationship of being to the essence of man.”

Metaphysical thought, in all its devising, actually acts as a barrier between us and

being. Heidegger laments that this could be the fate of metaphysics, stuck in its

nature. However, he finds a way out of thought, a way out of formulating being as

being. And that is the encounter with nothing.

First of all, Heidegger grounds his argument with exploring the problem with

thinking. Nothingness, being the ground of being in its multiplicity, is the only thing

that can rebirth us. It is so one, so consuming, that it alone may save us from our

formulations of being. Thinking does not operate within the trajectory of

encountering nothing, because, “for thinking, which in essence is always thinking

4 Heidegger, 5.5 Heidegger, 2.6 Heidegger, 35.

about something, would be working against its own nature in thinking about no-

thing.” 7 Therefore, Heidegger easily omits the ancient Platonic assumption that the

reasoning faculty of the soul is its highest part, or that “logic is the highest authority

on this question.”8 Since reason cannot encounter nothingness, it cannot encounter

being.

Only being in relation to nothingness qualifies as the objective emergence

Heidegger qualifies as being. He seeks the dread in which nothingness reveals itself

on its own terms, instead of as a contrived image of nothingness. In dread’s “very

moving away, it turns to us… There’s nothing to get a hold on. Dread reveals no-

thing.” 9 Dread, in its objectivity, moves all being away.

In the clear night of dread's no-thing, the original openness of be-ing as such

arises for the first time in such a way that it is [a kind of] be-ing and not no-

thing. In adding “and not no-thing" we have not, however, added a

clarification, but rather the predecessive potential of the openness of be-ing

in general. The essence of the originally nihilating no-thing is found in this: it

brings about being there first of all, before any kind of be-ing. Only on the

basis of the original manifestness of no-thing can the existence of human

beings reach and "get into" be-ing. Yet, inasmuch as existence of essence

relates itself to be-ing, which it is not and which it itself is, it comes forth as

such existence from that very no-thing which has already been revealed.

Being there means beholdenness to no-thing. 10

7 Heidegger, 11.8 Heidegger, 28.9 Heidegger, 42.10 Heidegger, 43.

In this passage, Heidegger summarizes our relationship to nothingness and being.

Only the experience of dread that we encounter so unwillingly can humble us and

renew us toward being. It is a “clear night” inasmuch as our resistance has

dissolved, and in our suffering, allowed it to consume us. Here, emergence can be

encountered, like being alive for our own last, and immediately thereafter, first

breath. From there on, the open sphere of being, and our place in it is born. Like the

rebirth Jesus preaches of, willingness to be amongst even dread is birth into being

beyond concepts: a dependency on time, a static openness to constant emergence-

being and time.

The “sphere of the open” is the “inwardly begotten emergence of being”

which is “given forth ecstatically.”11 Completely on its own, it opens up to us. We

witness it witnessing itself. Once we have surrendered to nothingness, we no longer

strive to contrive being. Therefore, being itself appears. The open sphere that

emerges in this begetting as it turns out to be “something” is called the “sense of

being.” To Heidegger, “’sense of being’ and ‘truth of being’ speak of the same thing.”

12 The intimations we receive, now with quieter minds, are attuned to being itself.

This is the new realm of being. Embedded deeply in both its nature and ours is “the

essence of making present.”13 Because it is constantly emerging, our way of relating

to it is to make present, “the present and lasting, unthought and hidden…Being as

such is born of time. Thus time is referred back to emergence, that is, the truth of

being.” 14This is truly and deeply inhabiting the world. It is mysterious and lifelong,

11 Heidegger, 53.12 Heidegger, 53.13 Heidegger, 17.14 Heidegger, 17.

quiet and loud. And since “no-thing is at one with be-ing as a whole,” experiencing

one is experiencing the other.

After this encounter with nothingness, there are other possibilities of this

revelation, particularly by being attuned to the whole. He offers the example of

profound boredom, which pulls oneself into the whole with “remarkable

indifference.” 15 There is also the joy in the “present existence, not merely the

person, of someone we love.” 16Even our situatedness in certain moods can disclose

being as a whole in its own way. All these revelations are “the fundamental event of

our being there.” Most vital to Heidegger is simply learning how to be there. He is

paving the way for the way to be.

The problem with thinking in Christianity is most made apparent in the

Philokalia. St. Isaiah the Solitary sees the danger of thoughts, and how they may

distort one’s perception of their heart in Christ. His entire treatise is a manual on

how to protect one’s heart from thoughts, which are so easily swayed by demons. To

be still, watchful, and “unbroken by any thought,” is to breathe and invoke

“endlessly and without ceasing, only Jesus Christ who is the Son of God and Himself

God.” 17To protect our true nature is to protect the divinization of our own hearts.

Thoughts, on the other hand, are easily led astray by the devil, and are predatory on

the heart and intellect of humanity. Since the intellect is easily deceived, St. Isaish

the Solitary advocates constantly interrupting it with the invocation of the name of

Christ, continually resisting their temptation and protecting the heart from

15 Heidegger, 44.16 Heidegger, 44.17 Palmer, G.E.H. The Philokalia. London: Faber and Faber, 1979, 163.

deception. The intellect is halted, in favor of the heart. Logic appears here again,

with no relation to the heart of true being, because it is easily tricked in illusory

appearances. The heart is, our nature is, and Christ is. Yet our thoughts are confused,

tricked, and convinced. As Evagrius the Solitary writes, “We must banish all

thoughts or tricks. ‘Be as ignorant and simple and at the same time a pensive child.’”

18

The duality of human nature, likened to emergent being, versus will, likened

to reason, reared its head in the doctrinal debates of the fourth and fifth centuries.

Christian thinkers argued over the way in which the Son was united to humanity.

One side asserted that human nature and the entire universe were enjoined to and

through the nature of Christ, whereas the other held that human will must purify

human nature in order to receive salvation. If our nature is redeemed, then we may

open up to being itself, instead of trying to use the will to fix our being. It is the

nature that needs and receives saving, “not the human will incapable of Jesus’

devotion.”19 It is the human will, then, that is capable of straying from its

human/Christ nature. Human nature needed redemption by divine nature, not

merely an ethical role-model. Cyril argued for the necessary unification of natures

for redemption, using the Eucharist as the microcosmic exemplar for the

macrocosm of human relationship with the Divine. The Eucharist shows the

necessity of the tangibility, and natural existence, of redemption. When the

“mystical gifts are sanctified,” we receive the Eucharist “as truly life-giving and the

Word’s own flesh. For by being nature, when he had become with one with his own

18 Palmer, 185.19 Black, Stephen. In class hand-out. Christology in the Fourth-Fifth Centuries.

flesh, he made it life-giving.” 20 As Athanasius wrote, “he, being conjoined with all by

a like nature, naturally clothed all with incorruption.” 21 It is a matter of life and

death in that, if salvation is by a conjunction of human will with the will of Christ, we

must cultivate ethical progress in order to have Divine life. Our will, and our reason,

are incapable of ultimate goodness and ultimate being. The nature side became

orthodoxy, and in my opinion, rightly so. This implies that we must be humbled to

our nature, and that we are able to experience Christ within it. It also implies that

this nature permeates the entire universe.

“For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to

save the world through him.” 22 Christ, divinizing the world, gives new meaning to

Heidegger’s “ecstatic instanding.” By beholding ourselves to nothing and being, by

the incarnation, we are now beholding ourselves fully to Christ Himself. Dread takes

on a new meaning. Encompassed by nothingness, we do find the “truth and sense of

being” in the “open sphere of being.” However, beneath that we also are thrust into a

true sense of God’s love, in a renewed openness as well. As Jerome Miller illuminates

in his essay, The Way of Suffering: A Reasoning of the Heart, “it is when one is lying in

that position (in our moments of anguish) that the word “God” ceases to be an

abstraction... Something that puts us face to face with our own nothingness.” 23 Like

Heidegger, Miller necessitates the experience of nothingness to apprehend Reality.

And, also like Heidegger, he motions that despair and dread are the only things that

20 Cyril Alex. Ep. 17.321 Athan. Inc. 922 The Holy Bible: New international version, containing the Old Testament and the New Testament.. Grand Rapids: Zondervan Bible Publishers, 1978, John 3:17.23 Miller, Jerome A.. The way of suffering: a geography of crisis. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1988, 8.

can take “us far enough out of our ordinary world to bring us to the brink of that

deeper intimacy.” 24 Despair leads us to look over the edge of our nothingness

without fully encountering it. Yet when one “removes even the final guardrail,”25

they are “in a position to know what it means to be loved into being by God.”26

Instead of looking down at nothingness, it requires looking up from nothingness to

the love of God. This is the nakedness of being. Here Miller asserts that this is the

only true experience of God. Only in extreme suffering does the intimation of God

die, and more truly appear. “What we do not realize is that only the most mortifying

wound can become an endless fountain.”27

My critique of Jerome Miller’s assertion is of the jump from the experience of

nothingness to the knowledge of God’s love. Since, within nothingness, “The idea of

"logic" itself dissolves in the rush of an original question.”28 The knowledge of God’s

love necessitates a logical effort, an attainment of an image that provides purpose

for the nothingness. Since nothingness must appear “on its own terms” according to

both Miller and Heidegger, it must be its own end, at least whilst being experienced.

The Heideggerian understanding infers that it opens us up to the open sphere of

being, while Miller’s indicates a direct receptiveness to the love of God. However, I

think that Miller is simply replacing old images with a new one, while Heidegger’s

allows for a lifelong openness to being. What the divinization of creation infers is

that being itself is inoculated with the love of Christ, and Christ-nature itself. I think

24 Miller, 9.25 Miller, 17.26 Miller, 19.27 Miller, 22.28 Heidegger, 43.

Miller’s understanding may take us back to images, while Heidegger’s allows for an

infinite space for divinization to occur within us, between us and being, between us

and Christ. The openness of this gets us out of our endless mind loops, and allows

for a vulnerability, a loving, and dedicated beholden-ness to being.

Heidegger ultimately reveals the way to the ground of consciousness, as it is

within being. Within a Christian framework, it is God experiencing God’s self. It is

our ground experiencing Christ within and without. “If existence were not already

beholden to no-thing, then it could not relate itself to be-ing and so not even to itself.

Without the original manifestness of no-thing, no selfhood and no freedom.” The

nothingness, which is the God within us, is the aware-ing self. Being present to life is

the movement of love. As Laird writes in Into the Silent Land, the ground of

ourselves is “depthless depth gazing into depthless depth.” Since we are the

mountain and not the weather, we are able to be courageously throughout all of it.

With the nothingness within us, we are free. And with the love of the whole, it is our

job and essence to be present.

As Heidegger seeks to encounter nothingness, a mystic seeks to encounter

Christ beyond images. Yet there are similar issues. If we attempt to encounter Christ

separate from our own natures, we only think up an image of Him. The only way to

experience Christ, then, is through nothingness, the world, and through our own

beings, all of which He fills. This is the epitome of incarnation. Since we are saved

with the world and not from it, we are free to become enjoined with the world, as

Christ enjoined Himself to it.

Heideggerian thought is significant to practicing this, because it provides the

philosophical and emotional language to shape our need for nothingness and being.

Christ’s incarnation is vital to Heideggerian practice because it engenders Godly love

into the nothingness of being and being itself. Both narratives can get stuck inside of

themselves, never manifesting the full potential of their implications for human

existence. The Christian metaphysic and Heideggerian notion of being, given to each

other, empower each other to yolk together nothingness and being, dread and love,

nature and humanity. They drastically allow for an infinite experience of infinity, life

and time experienced by being.

This leads to a fundamentally artistic and ecological life. The sphere of

openness unlocks all of being to be encountered, nurtured, and loved. The problems

with the way western philosophy, which has heavily contextualized Christianity, has

thought up metaphysics in a way unrelated to being itself, the catastrophic results of

which we can see now. The barrier Heidegger wrote of that this formulation upholds

between humanity and its essence is the isolating destructive force that plummets

our world into crisis.

In order for contemplative ecology to have full spiritual richness, Earth must

have intrinsic value. Metaphysical thought has always sought for some higher end

beside this-ness, which acts as a barrier to the essence of being. However,

Heidegger’s plunge into being, and the incarnation restrict the objectification and

exploitation of the world. Douglas Christie’s contemplative ecology seeks to

encounter Christ in His full implications for all of being.

Christie encountered Fr. Wadid in an Egyptian monastery, who simply

articulated the center of monastic life, which is “the practice of the Gospel, a lived

response to the Gospel.” Clear enough, but still utterly enigmatic, the “Gospel life”

bewildered Christie for a moment. “What exactly did it mean to live a Gospel life?”29

In the tradition of Antony who heard the Gospel and sold everything to withdraw,

Christie resolved that it must mean to find the “one thing necessary”. This necessary

withdrawal pushes one to “strip away everything, open oneself without condition or

hesitation to the infinite.”30 The question of how again arises, with the objective

clear.

To first find one’s self in the whole is to be oriented toward a contemplative

ecology. Meister Eckhart’s notion of “ground,” which is the ground of humanity as

well as God as well as everything, “stands at the center of everything that exists,”

and “contemplative living is nothing more or less than a simple awakening to its

ground.” Christie is careful to note that humanity has often detached its concerns

from its actual world, which has caused immense suffering to the whole. The

ultimate ground is to be discovered “here in the life and texture of particular places.”

31 In the chronology of Blue Sapphire of the Mind, Christie answers his question

before he asks it, by stating that this simple awareness is the one thing necessary.

To actually dwell in the place of God is to know one’s self as they exist within

“an intricate web of encompassing relationships.” 32 Christie, with the support of the

writings of Evagrius, calls for contact with the whole, with vehement and

29 Christie, 102.30 Christie, 103.31 Christie, 17.32 Christie, 34.

responsible awareness. Yet, making contact with a whole that is devastatingly

broken can be utterly dispiriting to the contemplative. This condition is named by

Robert Jay Lifton the “loss of symbolic immortality.” 33 The bewildering torment of

humanity’s comprehensive suicide can be traumatic. Home becomes unreachable

and place becomes abstract. Meadows become malls and our minds melt. The

physical, perceptual plane that seemed so static is suddenly unraveling irrevocably

into space, like a trail of beloved, earthly dust lost into an unapproachable, limitless

darkness. It is difficult, to say the very least, to see one’s own soul crumble. One

loses their language, even their ability to communicate. One is lost. And finally, one

has lost hope. However, we must not “prevent ourselves from responding

emotionally to the pain we cause or experience.” 34 The “stark, raw nakedness of the

apocalyptic psyche” is terrifying, but its very defenselessness is powerful to the

contemplative. The dread and nothingness is still the same, but now just made

physical. How one ought to respond to it remains- by having the courage to be.

However, being within this ecological crisis requires more than just witnessing

degradation, but “helping to heal and reconstitute the fragmented self, [and]

reknitting the entire fabric of being.” 35 It requires the contemplative to become

completely porous, so that the boundaries between them, others, the living world,

and God liquefy. In this can they experience the healing of their whole self, because

one part cannot break or heal by itself. The act of continuing awareness offers

palpable hope, and this lifelong commitment can turn into integration, which opens

33 Christie, 40.34 Christie, 40.35 Christie, 41.

“up a space in the soul, a space in which the world may live and move in us. And that

we are being called to renew our commitment to this work- for the sake of the

world.” 36 It is an unconditional love, emerging from within, no matter how

devastating the world becomes.

Grieving for the natural world enhances our intimacy with it, and deepens

our love. Dismantling our habit of objectifying the world, it intensifies one’s

awareness of their existence “as woven into an intricate fabric of being.” 37 Instead of

simply trying to replace old ideals with new artificial ones, grief is the way in which

one slowly learns to actually deal with a loss. The careful practice of having the

courage to be is vital to the fate of the world. Denial and repulsion end in the

“compulsion to repeat-“ resulting in an endless cycle of illusion and error.

Dependency on being itself is most intimidating when it necessitates encountering

loss. The painful slipping away of a beloved- forever- is possibly the most painful

thing a human being can experience. However, it ties us back in to the fabric that we

so desperately need for sustenance. The grief opens up raw love, and this raw love

becomes wide and electric.

Grieving, through artistic expression, can quickly and tangibly rest an

individual within their greater whole. W.G. Sebald’s investigation of post World War

II Germany left him empty-handed, having found little to no Germany literary

records of the late and post war periods. The collective German conscious had no

way to label or communicate their common desolation. Their bewilderment never

became anything more. Awareness and integration here become fundamentally

36 Christie, 69.37 Christie, 71.

artistic, in that they necessitate a new way of opening, articulating, and sieving.

Cultivating the ability to feel a new crisis means opening ourselves up to an

inwardly begotten new language. If we never speak that language, we will never

hear the magical compassion that connects us even in deepest shame and

barrenness. We will not come full circle, we will not come home. “It never became an

experience capable of public decipherment,” so it rotted unto death instead of new

life, sequestered within each person’s shame.38 If the contemplative is trying to

situate herself within the whole, her work is to mourn with it, heal with it, and find it

within itself even when it appears broken, constantly regenerating in luminous

interconnectivity.

The renewing power of tears accomplishes the task of including the human

struggle within the ecological whole. “To be intimate with the land like this is to

enclose it in the same moral universe we occupy, to include it in the meaning of

community.” 39 The responsibility is daunting, but the intimacy is irresistible.

Imagine a world where love is so big that home is everywhere.

This leads Christie into the work of place-making; being at home everywhere.

In an age that is increasingly placeless, mobile, and technological, Christie offers the

model of the Christian monks, who maintained awareness of themselves as exiles

while inhabiting particular places. To place-make is to “see more” into a place, until

it “emerges with blazing clarity.”40 To identify with place is to look upon a place with

care and sensitivity and to become part of its network. This kind of seeing is the way

38 Christie, 81.39 Christie, 96.40 Christie, 118.

of seeing into the heart of reality, what the early Christians called theoria. 41 The

monk ideally may see the Divine face within a place, without letting the place fully

own them. Paradoxically, they must belong to it and not. The monk walks the line

between dispossession and integration: letting go of abstractions, and opening up to

being as it is; leaving home, and inhabiting a place. The place of God can only be

found by those who are willing to become strangers. 42 The selfhood and freedom

that emerges from nothingness allows one to behold themselves to being.

Perhaps most relevant to this treatise is Christie’s chapter, Logos: The Song of

the World. This most unsparingly elucidates how we experience Christ. Sharing

Christ-nature with all of being, we listen for “’the birth of the Word in the soul,’ and

outward- toward an encounter with the Word Incarnate in all creation, all matter.” 43

“Inwardly begotten,” as Heidegger spoke of emergent being, is the Word, within us

and everything. The Incarnate Word

has three distinct but related dimensions. It is utterly transcendent, being

identical with the totality of the ideas or powers of God. It is also the

principle or pattern of everything that has been created. And it is the anima

mundi, or world soul, the law and harmony of the universe, the power that

holds it together and permeates it from the center to its most extreme

boundaries.”44

Logos is the mysterious hidden and emergent core of being, the aware-ing self, and

the nothingness that adheres them. Though it is both transcendent and immanent,

41 Christie, 118.42 Christie, 121.43 Christie, 187.44 Christie, 194.

its nature remains fully intact whatever its manifestation. Since it is Christ, it infuses

all of life with a self-emptying love, “because Christ is Himself the Word of God, who

in His invisible form pervades us universally in the whole world, and encompasses

its length and breadth and height and depth…the Son of God was also crucified in

these, imprinted in the form of a cross on the universe.” 45 It becomes the lifelong

journey of the contemplative to learn now to hear for the hidden and revealed

Christ, both in silence and in the song of the world. “The wild world has its own

voice, its own language. Learning how to listen is part of our common task”

(Christie, 189). The term “logos” has been used exhaustively over time to

substantiate certain forces, often “exclusive and anthropocentric,”46 however the

ecological association as stated above is the most deeply incarnational. It is that

which is most essential for being, “the one thing necessary” for it, and therefore the

one thing necessary for us to contact. In the Heideggerian framework, the logos is

the essence of being that hides while revealing itself in being, and to see it we must

meet face to face with it in silence, nothingness, and then however it may present

itself, in the whole. However, if the revealed Christ is that essence of being that we

seek, the vulnerability to give one’s self to the Otherness of being is not simply a

philosophical pursuit, but an expression of the most loving relationship (in the

Trinity), and the tenderly overwhelming grace and allure of being able to encounter

it, our whole lives long. It is rich and exciting for the individual, but it also has vast

power for healing, as Christ’s love wraps them in the whole. “This basic Christian

idea could be retrieved as a force for healing and reconciliation between the human

45 Christie, 194.46 Christie, 187.

community and the natural world.” 47 The Christian contemplative tradition invites a

reconsideration of how the Word speaks “in the deepest reaches of the soul and in

the endless intricacy of the life of the world.” 48 The beautiful thing about logos is

that is possesses the holy ground to support us, love in our souls to enliven us, and

connectivity with the entire universe to magnetize us outward.

Seeing now logos “guiding alike the flight of the sparrow and the life of the

sage,” 49 the term “wildness” now has new significance. The nature of all things,

wildness within us and all around, is sacred, and remains sacred insofar as it is

untouched. “There are no unsacred places. There are only sacred places and

desecrated places.” Wildness, in its own self, is the holy “way of Great Nature.” 50

Wildness is the world. It is not its quarantined parts. Once we see the connection

between our souls and the overwhelming sanctity of the universe the way it is, our

entire disposition rattles and then, like a wave crashing into white noise, settles.

Listen now to the world. It is blue. It is beautiful. It is holy. It is forever wild.

“The world is incomprehensible apart from the Word.” 51 Without its

unconditional power, we would not be able to stand to the destruction we face

today. Were it not for its incarnation, our souls would be completely lost.

Because nothing can take away the logos, nothing can take away the

wildness. The one thing necessary always remains.

47 Christie, 187.48 Christie, 187.49 Christie, 189.50 Christie, 188.51 Christie, 189.

And it sings and mourns in our hearts each morning and night like the

forever lingering ghost of a sparrow.

Becoming alive to the Word inside of us may seem impossible. As much as we

objectify Earth, we objectify ourselves. Thinking of ourselves only in terms of our

utility or socially appointed worth becomes habit, and the clear vision of ourselves

is matted over with rusty veins of thought and demons. We are indeed possessed!

Yet the Word makes itself known to us in moments of awe and beauty; the mood of

the sky at dawn and the way it croaks into lilting afternoon sunlight, then revolving

toward star-studded breath. This is indeed grace. But how do we integrate that

necessary thing into our whole lives? The Word is inside of us, but we are full of

loopholes, misperceptions and terrors. It must, then, require a sort of surrender. It is

truly and fully listening to the Word being spoken. “Listening this deeply always

meant entering, again, into wordless silence.” 52 Only silence can hear the thing

appear on its own terms, wild and sacred, “pristine” from thought. We are simply

receiving the gift. “Learning to listen and respond to the Word, opening oneself to

the transformative power, allowing oneself to become incorporated into the life of

the Word, learning to dwell in the silence from which the Word arises and toward

which it always tends- these are the most fundamental and enduring challenges of

Christian contemplative life.” 53 And they are necessary for the complete, ecstatic

encounter with being as it is, unconditionally beautiful. Entering this new realm,

however, requires no reservations. One must be completely reborn to this “open

sphere” if they are to be actually transformed by it. It necessitates extreme

52 Christie, 198.53 Christie, 198.

watchfulness, but more importantly, love. To become wild again, Christ again, one

must essentially throw out all of their beliefs about the world. The objectifying and

fearing habits of mind are loud and strong, and if I spend my whole life trying to

fight them, I will never “learn to listen carefully to the Word that is beckoning to me,

from deep within my own soul and from the heart of the world.” 54 My heart is loud

with Word while my mind attempts to battle it with words. To respond with my

mind to my heart, I must truly take the gift within myself. The “creative yearning”

Heidegger speaks of is the yearning to take this gift. However, there is also fear and

hesitation in taking it completely. Once we receive it, we no longer have the “God” of

our dreams. We have Him only here. We have no concepts to hold onto, no guilt,

fear, or shame. We are no longer in control, no longer separate, no longer victims.

Our guardrail is gone. Love pours in but so does potential for loss and grief. I

become so engulfed in the whole that it drowns me, but I am in love. It is a very

alive death.

Christie beautifully articulates this profoundly necessary arc: “from the initial

stillness in which the revelatory power of the Word is first heard, felt, and

apprehended; to the long, purifying ascesis in which one learns to relinquish all

attachments that keep one from hearing and living into the Word; to that endless

expanse of emptiness and silence within and beyond the Word into which one

gradually learns to dwell.” 55 The ascesis is long, but not necessarily grueling. It can

be made a beautiful process of letting go, and it is full of grace and mercy. However,

it is extremely necessary, because without letting go, the Word can never truly

54 Christie, 198.55 Christie, 201.

enter. Misperception is very dangerous. But not to worry, it is only dangerous

because it is not true.

There are two tensions, however, in this arc that I would like to mention.

First, it is the tension of having vs. being possessed that lies in the final plateau of

Christie’s arc. Fully receiving the Word means being able to integrate it and embody

it. The careful, lifelong act of embodying the Word necessitates opening up to it, as

well as taking it, responding to it, and creating a language for it. My only fear is that

in doing so, we stray from it. However, this is a lifelong, day-by-day process of

watchfulness, trust and growth. The answer here rests in the practice itself.

The second is “the tension between the impulse to honor and value the living

world by virtue of its having been brought into being sustained by the Word, and the

impulse to detach oneself from the world for the sake of the eternal Word that exists

both within and beyond the created world.” 56 My initial question of how to truly live

the Gospel remains. Christie asks if we can attend to both the embodied Word and

its eternal self. What I, with the support of Heideggerian thought, am suggesting, is

that encountering one is necessarily encountering the other. Being and nothingness,

the embodied Word and the eternal Word, must be received as one, because they

are one. Both detaching from the world and detaching from the selfhood within us

are conceptual prisons. Either one divides. That goes against the contemplative

notion of self-informing, self-sufficient wildness and wholeness. The thought that we

need to do anything besides clothe ourselves in what has been given to us is the

seed of isolation. That, I think, is a misperception that needs to be radically shaken

56 Christie, 201.

off. In facing nothingness, we face being. We must encounter this one Logos, in the

way that it moves behind and through us. Forgetting our attachments to conceptual

prisons will help us conquer this “impulse to detach,” and instead continually find

the gift of encounter. If He is all around us, there is no need to hide. And as soon as

we do, the barrier we create cascades into world destroying consequences.

Especially in this time of technological isolation, industrial utility, and ecological

crisis, it is mandatory for the contemplative to receive the whole of being with the

radical willingness that Heidegger necessitates. Christie concludes the chapter with

this very sentiment when he begs, “Can we recover a sense of world so pregnant

with Word, a sense of Word so intimately bound up with the very life of the

world?”57 To do this, we must stand naked in front of being, yes. But we also must

know in our hearts that what we are ultimately receiving is love. And we will know

this by being itself.

Re-imagining paradise informs our experience of the world with a certain

expectancy. However, this expectancy holds the purity and innocence of intuition,

and is not formulating being as something other than itself. Rather, it is that “true

sense of being” that Heidegger articulates, and what Merton names as

“heavenliness.” Merton writes, “Pure- no pathos, no statement, no desire, pure

heavenly sound. Seized by this ‘heavenliness’ as if I were a child- a child’s mind I

have never done anything to deserve…Sense that ‘heavenliness’ is the real nature of

things, not their nature, not en soi, but the fact that they are a gift of love and

freedom.” 58 This heavenly sense is the culmination of everything. Heidegger’s

57 Christie, 224.58 Christie, 351.

nothingness is the freedom of the nothingness of self that allows for everything.

Beyond just being purifying for the individual’s mind, this implies that all of being is

not simply an automatic experience, but a gift of “love and freedom.” Because there

is love, there is freedom. Contacting being is not necessary. It is a gift. And as Merton

writes, we have done nothing to deserve it, or to even deserve the sense of it. That is

how we feel and know love in our beings. This is the truest sense of being, in its

freedom and beauty, and in its gift. This is what all that dread and nothingness

allows for. And that is why we must come back to Earth, embracing being, not as a

job, but as a vocation: to listen to and possess the song of the Word in the deepest

chamber of our hearts. The journey does not stop in that enveloping death.

What Heidegger and Miller may omit is that, inasmuch as dread and

nothingness appear in themselves, so too does the fullness of love. It is not a

concept, or a special knowledge. Rather it unconditionally animates and holds both

being and nothing, us included, and we know that in our innocence. When we re-

imagine the world as paradise, this may not be so hard to believe. When we stop

thinking that there is something wrong with it, we may be able to receive the full gift

of the contemplative life. To be reborn into the “open sphere” of being is not to be

confused with being thrust out naked into an endless void. It is how we pave the

way for being to enter ourselves, in its total wildness, excluding nothing. It is the

expectancy and fearlessness of the innocent heart. It is the life of giving one’s heart,

and taking another’s. This static and evolutionary cause is Heidegger’s radical

vulnerability, and Christianity’s eternal love, scattered into everything, beholding us

beloved-ly to the beloved universe. What else could be the one thing necessary?

Works Cited

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Heidegger, Martin. Introduction to metaphysics. New Haven: Yale University Press,

2000.

Miller, Jerome A.. The way of suffering: a geography of crisis. Washington, D.C.:

Georgetown University Press, 1988.

Newman, John Henry. Select treatises of St. Athanasius in controversy with the Arians.

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Palmer, G.E.H.. The Philokalia. London: Faber and Faber, 1979.

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